Q: While I was lying awake last night your approach of making sites the day before implantation came to mind. It takes guts to have spearheaded that! I am not aware that that precedent has been set in hair transplant surgery. I would have been timid about infection; it’s a lot like closing a wound with a foreign body in it the next day. As with most things, I am a little slow to jump on board something new so I’m glad you’ve paved the way. Do you have any hesitance about this or do you have enough experience that you no longer hesitate? I would be concerned that variations of the local flora might make a difference and that, accordingly, a large sample size would be necessary to get comfortable. Glad for all of us that you are still blazing trails. — S.S., Shanghai, China
A: Thanks for your kind words. No hesitancy whatsoever. We find no increased risk. Think of it as if you did a hair transplant and ran out of grafts. The remaining sites don’t get infected, they just close up. In the process, all those chemotactic factors involved in the healing process move toward the wounds, so if a graft is placed into them, they would be less likely to get infected than a graft placed into a fresh (non-primed) wound, not more. It is like applying the surgical dressing Duoderm to a wound that helps it auto-sterilize. Putting the speculative science aside, we have not seen one single issue with it. Give it a try with an FUE or FUT procedure. Make the sites, have the patient takes his normal shower that night and you will be pleasantly surprised how little bleeding there is the next day and how easy it is to place the grafts.
Read a summary of the article on pre-making recipient sites
Read the full article as it was published in the Hair Transplant Forum International
Posted by
GQ Magazine includes a quotation by Dr. Bernstein in their November 2010 issue. In the magazine’s “Manual” section, which outlines the latest style trends for men, there is a two-page article on 
The November 2006 issue of Gotham Magazine featured Dr. Bernstein in their article on cosmetic surgery and hair transplantation. Read below for a selection from the article, titled “A Cut Above,” which includes the portion about Dr. Bernstein.
Once the province of wealthy older women, cosmetic surgery has gone mainstream, with everyone from teenage girls to investment bankers and politicians going under the knife, needle, or laser in the name of aesthetic self-improvement.
PDF Version
Follicular Unit Forum is unique in that it affords visitors an opportunity to anonymously ask questions about the “ins and outs” of hair transplant surgery, of those who actually have had the state-of-the-art Follicular Unit Hair Transplant procedures.
“Hair Transplantation” is one in a series of medical textbooks published by Elsevier Saunders. The textbook — part of a series entitled Procedures in Cosmetic Dermatology — is written by Robert S Haber and Dowling B. Stough and edited by Jeffrey S. Dover. “Hair Transplantation” offers a step-by-step, practical guide to performing cutaneous surgical procedures.
The following is a portion of “An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” an editorial written by O’Tar T. Norwood, MD — founder of the Norwood Classification System for Hair Loss — and published in the May/June 1997 issue of “Hair Transplant Forum International”:
